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It was the day after the Gator Bowl, and many prominent people were at the Roosevelt.

Miss America Donna Axum gets a kiss from Bill Fielden after he rescued her from the deadly fire at the Roosevelt Hotel Dec. 29, 1963, in Jacksonville. Smoke caused 19 of the deaths — a woman fell from a knotted sheet and a fire chief died of a heart attack.

Twenty-two died in Jacksonville’s deadliest fire Dec. 29, 1963, at the Roosevelt Hotel. Horror capped a Gator Bowl weekend as smoke swirled up shafts. Rooms clogged with lethal fumes quickly seething to the upper floors, bunching in a deadly blanket.

Guests were hustled into Adams and Monroe streets, where they watched firefighters and helicopters struggle to save others. This is the register at Snyder Memorial Church where 208 hotel guests were taken before going to other hotels.

More than 50,000 football fans had streamed into Jacksonville the day before to see the University of North Carolina tromp Air Force Academy 35-0 in the 19th edition of the Gator Bowl Football Classic.

But the morning after the game turned into a nightmare about 7:45, when guests of one downtown hotel, that included pigskin fans, sportswriters and prominent personalities, found smoke creeping into their rooms.

The fire early that Sunday morning, Dec. 29, 1963, would turn out to be Jacksonville’s deadliest, claiming the lives of 22 people — 15 more people than died in the great Jacksonville fire of 1901. That was the one that burned the town down, drove 8,677 people from their homes, destroyed 2,368 structures, including 23 churches and 10 hotels, and consumed 446 acres.

The Roosevelt Hotel at 33 W. Adams St. was packed with nearly 500 guests in town for the big game, including the reigning Miss America 1964, Donna Axum, 21, of Arkansas, who had to be treated for smoke inhalation at Baptist Medical Center.

Of the dead, some were found in their beds where they had choked for their last breath. One woman met death on a third-floor roof after falling from the 11th floor while trying to slide down a sheet dangling from her window. Numerous sheet and blanket ropes hung from hotel windows.

The body of one man could be seen draped over a windowsill on the 11th floor where he died attempting to climb out of the window.

Assistant Fire Chief J.R. Romedy succumbed from a heart attack while fighting the fire and directing survivors to safety.

The cause of the fire, which broke out in a second-story ballroom, was never determined, but the fire never got above the second floor. It was the deadly smoke and gases that billowed up air shafts, filled the hotel hallways and crept under hotel room doors that took its toll. Twenty guests, staying on the seventh floor and above, died of asphyxiation.

The city’s two 100-foot aerial trucks reached only to the seventh floor of the Roosevelt, but officials said later that any lengthier ladders would become ungainly. Had the city summoned a large truck crane to the burning hotel, would it have been useful? Not very, according to a fire chief and an official of M.D. Moody & Sons Inc., a heavy equipment dealer here. A Moody spokesman said if the call had gone out, it would have taken at least 90 minutes to get a crane to the scene and get it into operation. Firefighters completed rescue operations at the hotel a little more than an hour after the first alarm was sounded.

More than 70 victims were treated at hospitals for smoke inhalation and the majority of guests escaped without injury. The Navy used eight helicopters working in relays to pluck 14 people from the roof. Survivors wrote letters of thanks to the Jacksonville department. A thorough inspection of the hotel 10 days earlier found it complied to the letter with all safety rules.

The late Times-Union columnist Bill Foley later reported that word reached the “throbbing” (at 7:45 on a Sunday morning?) newspaper city room through the miracle of modern technology. Electrician Jimmy Bayer saw the smoke when he was cleaning the air-conditioning tower on the roof of the newspaper building at 400 W. Adams St.

Within an hour, wrote Foley, “the largest collective hangover in the history of modern journalism was gathered around Times-Union City Editor Don Calfee. The newspaper staff had celebrated with gusto the day before and nobody expected to work Sunday.”

Survivors rescued from the hotel were taken to a small auditorium at nearby Snyder Memorial Methodist Church at the corner of Laura and Adams streets where a central identification register was set up. While they milled around searching for relatives, Salvation Army officers were busy passing out coffee and cinnamon rolls to survivors, police and firefighters.

As word of the disaster spread across the city, lines of donors formed at the Jacksonville Blood Bank.

Times-Union police reporter Rabun Matthews, then 23, had been on the staff for 2½ years and was married to the daughter of Bob Neighbors, the Roosevelt’s VP and general manager. But he almost missed covering the disaster. Matthews and his wife had left Jacksonville to visit his grandmother in Macon, Ga. They had barely gotten to sleep when there was a phone call that the hotel was on fire.

“So we packed up and headed back to Jacksonville,” Matthews said last week from his home in St. Simons Island, where he retired in 2002. “By the time we got back most of the stuff about the fire was being covered — except for Miss America who was recovering at the hospital. She was pretty bedraggled but they put her together real fast.”

According to news clippings of the fire coverage, Axum told Matthews she thought first of Dallas and the assassination of President John Kennedy just weeks earlier because she had been there also. “I guess I was just thinking of the hopelessness of the situation,” she said.

Just seven hours after her rescue, and showing no visible signs of the harrowing experience, she smiled radiantly at a hospital news conference, Matthews reported.

She told Matthews she owed her escape to the son of a Miami PR man traveling with the Miss America entourage. Bill Fielden, 19, his brother, Mark, 16, and their father, W.A. Fielden, were in a room across from the suite on the 10th floor occupied by Axum and her chaperone, Lucille Prevatti, 39.

“The first thing I heard was the phone ringing in the living room of the suite,” Axum told Matthews. “I didn’t bother to get up and answer it because I thought it was just the operator trying to wake us up early. As is my usual manner, I was staying in bed as long as possible.”

Then she said she heard sirens and smelled smoke and woke Prevatti. They rushed to a window and opened it in an attempt to get fresh air. The smoke was so dense, she said, they could hardly see.

Then Bill Fielden got into their room, threw a wet towel over Axum’s head and led the women across the hall to his room. The Fieldens’ room had been protected from most of the smoke because they had placed wet towels and blankets at the bottom of the doors.

Bill Fielden, who had recently been discharged from the Navy, estimated it was more than two hours before firefighters finally reached their room and told them it was all right to leave.

Axum told Matthews the only things she took from her room were two handbags and her crown. She left the building wearing pajamas, slippers and a beaver coat.

“It was the worst fire I ever covered in terms of loss of life,” recalled Matthews, who left the Times-Union in 1971 and later that year got into television news by writing for Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News in New York for three years. In the next 31 years, Matthews held a number of television news positions at stations across the country including news director and station manager.

The hotel had been built in 1926 for $2 million as the Carling Hotel. After the fire, the Roosevelt was extensively remodeled. A plush rooftop club, known as The Spa, and featuring a dining room, swimming pool, sundeck and club rooms, was in operation atop the Hotel Roosevelt Auto Garage.

The hotel closed Sept. 1, 1969, and was purchased by the Presbyterian Synod of Florida, which reopened it in April 1971 as a retirement home for the elderly, Jacksonville Regency House. The name was changed to Adams Plaza in the late 1980s when it was sold but continued to be operated by Regency House Ltd. In the mid-2000s, the building reopened as rental apartments called The Carling.